


Story: Zatanna

by EddyBoy, hdctbpal



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bondage, F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-14 15:34:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18950959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EddyBoy/pseuds/EddyBoy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hdctbpal/pseuds/hdctbpal
Summary: Sixth of Hdctbpal´s stories based on Sabu´s bad ending pics.





	1. Chapter 1

The man hadn't slept. He lay there on his sweat-soaked bunk, staring at the overhead. Every time he thought of the task ahead his heart pounded so hard it seemed to be thumping behind his eyes. The rolling of the ship, far from lulling him, only worsened his nerves. He was far from home, and no sailor.

It had taken weeks of searching but he had finally found passage on this bucket of a cargo ship bound from Osaka to Jayapura. Tonight, he had calculated, he would be over Challenger Deep, a slot seven miles long and a mile wide, a nick in the southern tip of the fifteen-hundred-mile crescent that was the Mariana Trench. It was nearly seven miles down. A fitting gravesite.

A shaft of moonlight, made watery by the grimy porthole, swung back and forth between his bunk and the bulkhead. Unwillingly, he had learned to tell the hour by its arc. It was time. He sat upright, then groaned as a stab of fear struck his watery bowels. But the pain helped propel him out of the bed.

He took small steps but the cabin was cramped and he was soon there. With a shaking hand he took the keys he wore on a chain around his neck and opened the three heavy padlocks that secured the thick wooden chest.

He would have just thrown the chest overboard, but it was too heavy for him to lift or even drag. The sailors had to help him bring it aboard. Their smooth faces were unreadable, but he thought he detected resentment as they grunted and struggled with it, even though he had tipped them well - but not too well.

His clothes were shabby - again, deliberately so - and the chest itself was battered and scarred, but he feared its weight and the extra padlocks would attract unwanted attention. He had a pistol, but it was their ship and he knew he was at their mercy. They could turn on him at any time, throw his body overboard and claim he fell. Then they would have the chest.

His mouth drew back from his teeth in a mirthless smile. In his wasted face it was a skull's grin. Had the crew seen that grin, or had they known what was really in that chest, they would have done better to jump ship themselves.

The last latch clanked open and he lifted the lid with a creak, more than half expecting something to burst out at him. But no, there was just the wooden crate, a toy inside the massive chest. The crate was new, but had no odor; it was made from Quebracho, among the heaviest and hardest of woods, whose name derived from "quebrar hacha", meaning "axe breaker". It was secured not with nails, but with dull gray titanium screws. The pilot holes had to be made with a special diamond-tipped drill bit.

He put on a pair of heavy brown work gloves - they looked ludicrous on his scarecrow's figure - and lifted out the crate, holding it almost at arm's length. He had left his cabin door ajar so he might hear anyone approaching. He paused there and listened, though it was doubtful he could have heard anything over the rushing of his blood. Slowly, alert to any creaks, he eased the door open with his foot, then moved out into the passageway almost in a crouch, careful not to trip on the coaming.

His caution was wasted; the ship seemed almost deserted. Topside, the night was pleasant - warm but not too humid. He would almost have preferred the icy wind and rain of the Atlantic; it would have seemed more fitting than the placid tropical Pacific.

At the railing, he lifted the crate, then hesitated. He took a deep breath, let it out. "Goodbye, Jane," he said softly. Even after so much time, the words unexpectedly made his eyes sting. It seemed obscene to say those words when he was in fact putting to rest not the woman he had loved but the horror that had claimed her. But he saw now the two acts were inextricably joined. To throw this - thing - overboard was to give up his last hope of getting her back. But there never had been any such hope. He thought he had accepted that long ago, but -

His thoughts were broken by a small, metallic clink at his feet. He glanced down. There was a small dark shape, long and thin, lying on the deck and moving in a slow arc like the second hand of a clock. Then, as the ship rolled to port, the moonlight crept over it and he saw what it was. It was a screw, rolling on the deck. It did not reflect the moonlight.

He frowned. There was no way one of those screws could have come loose. Not after the way he had tightened them. He looked back up at the crate he held and saw it was bulging slightly in the center. There was another clink, and another, as two more screws joined the first.

His heart seemed to pause, as if gathering itself, then gave one great spasm; it was like a hammer blow to the chest. He opened his mouth to scream.

The crate exploded. Splinters lanced into his face, his chest, his arms, his groin. He couldn't see. He screamed and screamed, but the only sound was an eerie low wheezing; his larynx had been pierced.

Something long and thin but incredibly strong snaked around his waist, constricting, crushing. He felt himself being lifted, and somehow he knew there was no longer a ship beneath him, but only water, miles of water. His terror was so great that even the pain barely registered. His limbs flailed, frantic to find something to hold on to, but there was nothing. And yet he was not falling.

Then he heard the thing speak. It had spoken to him only once before, after it had taken Jane.

"We told you," it said. It sounded reluctant, regretful, but firm, like a parent forced to discipline a wayward child. It was, in fact, the voice of his long-dead father, plucked from his long-buried memories, though his conscious mind was far past recognizing it.

"We told you she would be happier with us," the thing said. "We hoped you would understand."

Then he was falling. He struck the water with what felt like a shattering impact, like falling through a sheet of ice. It was freezing, far colder than the Pacific should have been, and somehow blacker even than the moments after he was blinded. The water seemed to be crushing him from all sides, and he had barely begun the journey to Challenger Deep. Unthinking, he tried to breathe, and sucked in a lungful of icy water that burned like fire.

*

Later, one of the crew paused for a smoke on the way to his bunk. He was about to flick the butt over the railing when something caught his eye.

It glittered even in the poor light. He picked it up. It was a pendant. A diamond pendant on a gold chain. He weighed it in his hand. Real gold and a real diamond. He didn't know how he knew that; somehow the thought flashed across his mind and then it was as if he had always known. Quickly, instinctively, he stuffed the pendant in the pocket of his grimy trousers, then glanced around casually to make sure no one had seen. No one had.

The pendant should have been cold, but it was warm, as if someone had just dropped it. Perhaps that strange passenger. This must have come out of that chest - the crewman had been one of those who had to lug the damned thing aboard, after which the captain had pocketed their tips, of course. Maybe, the crewman mused, there was justice in the world after all.

He looked around carefully, furtively, in case there was anything else. The moon had sunk behind the ship's superstructure now and it was hard to see. He was hardly looking for splinters or bloodstains, so he didn't see them; if he had, he would have had trouble picking them out from the usual filth that coated the deck.

At last he continued back to his bunk, disappointed at not finding more loot. Still, he thought with a smile, his girl back in Osaka would certainly appreciate this. He had been thinking of breaking up with her - she was a little too anxious to have fancy things like this pendant, and he suspected her of playing the field while he was at sea earning the money to pay for them.

But now he found himself thinking instead of her full, almost pouting mouth, her lush breasts, and her wide hips. He felt himself hardening as he thought about what they would do together on his next return home. He hurried to his bunk to think about it in more detail.

******

Some years later...

Zatanna moaned quietly into her gag. She was kneeling, nude, on the hard wooden floor of her basement study. The room was lit only by a few candles, casting overlapping shadows of her across the floor and on the walls and the rows of books. Her wrists were secured behind her back by thin steel handcuffs. The handcuffs were joined by a chain to another set that enclosed her ankles.

She could have escaped easily, except for the gag.

Zatanna had never told anyone, least of all her father, what had really drawn her to practicing magic. She studied it, to please him, but her heart was elsewhere. She wanted to be a pilot, maybe even an astronaut.

One night, while her father was traveling for one of his shows, she was sitting on the couch eating popcorn and flicking idly through channels on television. She ran across a magic show, but not one of her father's; it starred a young woman only a few years older than Zatanna, with long dark hair like she had. Intrigued despite herself, she stopped and watched.

The woman was elaborately bound with a variety of restraints and then lowered into a large glass tank that was then filled with water. As she watched all this, Zatanna had a strange, tight feeling in her tummy - or maybe a little lower down - that she couldn't identify at the time. It wasn't that she was attracted to women. Rather, she found herself wondering what it would be like to be in that young woman's place - to have all those handcuffs and ropes and chains and padlocks put on her. Of course, with or without a father in the business, she was old enough to know it was an illusion, that the woman would escape.

But Zatanna lay awake in her bed long into the night, staring unseeing at the ceiling and wondering: what if it weren't an illusion? What if it were real? And what if it were her?

The idea should have been scary. And it was. But there was something else there. Something that sent a warm flush up the back of her neck, that made her squirm and rub her thighs together. Something that, somehow, blended into the fear, so that it wasn't precisely fear any more, but something more...intriguing. Something that, suddenly, seemed wonderfully mysterious and enticing.

After that, she devoted all her spare time to studying magic. Especially escapology. She was more interested in being restrained than in escaping - in fact she was always obscurely disappointed after learning the way out of some seemingly inescapable situation - but some instinct told her to conceal this, even before she felt the usual adolescent awkwardness about matters of sex.

Her father was more of a pure illusionist, but he happily encouraged her newfound interest, never giving a hint of suspecting what lay beneath it.

Eventually, of course, she came to understand what she had felt that first night, and to separate it from her profession. For by now magic was her profession; she was too good at it, better even than her father had been, not to find satisfaction in it. That didn't mean she lost her interest in restraint; to the contrary, once it was disentangled from her career, it took even deeper root and flourished. Now the only problem was -

Zatanna's thoughts were interrupted by a faint sound. She thought it had come from upstairs. Was it the old house settling? Or - her breath caught and her body seemed to try to shrink from the inside. Was it the sound the front door made? Of wood scraping against wood? The front door, whose doorway was warped with age, so it needed an extra shove to open? Oh God, had she locked it?

Another creak. That one might be the house settling. Or it might be a footstep.

Another creak. Definitely a footstep. Oh God, oh God. She was breathing quite rapidly now. Sweat broke out all over her naked body and she felt the pinpricks of sweat under her lush dark hair.

Another footstep. She didn't think it was any closer than the previous one. She let out the breath she was holding and her body slumped slightly in her restraints. It was just some thief. He (she was somehow sure it was a he) would take what little he could find upstairs and leave. Zatanna lived alone, and kept few valuables, except her books, and those wouldn't interest thieves. And a thief wouldn't come downstairs. A thief would always keep an exit open, and the only way out of her basement was the cramped stairwell with its rickety staircase -

Another footstep. Closer?

Another. Definitely closer.

A creak that wasn't a footstep; it was the door to the basement opening. Zatanna's body was now coated in a sheen of sweat that had gone cold, making her shiver, which made the chain between her handcuffs rattle. She grabbed the chain with both hands to try to steady it. Go away, she thought, go away...

Another footstep, different now, much louder: the first stair. Then the second.

Zatanna did have a means of escape - after all, she had to free herself eventually - but right now it was useless. Behind her, in the V made by her calves, was a small jar with the keys to the handcuffs in it. The trouble was, the keys were frozen in ice, which was surely nowhere near melted. Desperately she grabbed the jar and tried to unscrew the lid, but it was wet with condensation and her fingers were slick with sweat.

Creak. Creak. The footsteps were confident, almost leisurely, as if the intruder knew he was the master here. Any instant now he would see her.

She thrust the jar underneath her and knelt down on it, trying to hide it - and thaw it - with her body. Maybe she could distract the intruder and get it open while she wasn't looking. But the metal lid was icy cold against her perineum and she gasped, unable to stop herself. The footsteps paused. He had heard her.

Yes, there's someone here, she thought. For all you know I'm waiting down here with a gun. Back up the stairs. Run! She would have shouted it at him, but -

The footsteps started again, and the intruder stepped off the staircase to the wooden floor. Her back was to him. She closed her eyes and let out a low moan into her gag; she couldn't help it.

"Well, well." The man's voice had a theatrical smirk in it.

Her eyes flew open, as if she could see him, though all she could see was the wall of her study. Her shadow was engulfed by his as he stepped forward. His voice...her heart sank as she recognized it. This was bad. Far worse than some random housebreaker.

"What have we here?" he said. She wanted to groan at his trite dialogue, but -

He strolled around to stand in front of her. She could do nothing but stare up at him, her blue eyes wide.

He stroked his chin. If he'd had a mustache, he'd have twirled it. "What have you gotten yourself into this time, Zatanna?"

"Mmph!" she said.

His stage name was Ilmar the Inimitable. Professionally, he and she were bitter rivals - though in Zatanna's private opinion, he wasn't even in her league.

He reached down and took hold of her chin. "What was that?"

"Mmmrgh!" she said, her dark eyebrows drawing together.

"Oh, my," he said. "Not so tough without your spells, are you?"

Unseen, she twisted at the chain that joined her pairs of handcuffs, feeling a frustration that had little to do with her inability to speak. One thing a good magician had to be was a good actor, which Ilmar wasn't. There was a certain humiliation in having him speak to her like this, but it wasn't the right kind of humiliation, either.

But he was doing his best. And he was doing what she wanted. He always was good to her. Privately, they had a very nice relationship. She found herself wanting to smile as she thought about that. Which hardly fit the mood.

It had taken her a long time to confess this...interest she had to him. She had never told anyone before, and she couldn't imagine telling anyone but him. The trouble was, when you had to explain it, it lost something. She wanted him to surprise her. Maybe even scare her. Just a little. But not too much. She wanted him to read her mind, she supposed - to give her not just what she wanted, but what she wanted without knowing it. Even though she knew that wasn't reasonable.

So she went along and tried to keep alight the small flame of arousal that had been steadily building through the long evening of anticipation. She squirmed and struggled in her restraints and made angry sounds into her gag as he taunted her. At last he pulled away the tape that secured her gag, careful not to hurt her. The gag, which she had put in herself earlier that evening, was a pair of her own white panties - clean, of course.

He unzipped his slacks and pressed the head of his cock against her thinned lips, smearing it with her coral lipstick and her mouth with his pre-cum. She looked up at him with a mixture of real and feigned resentment, knowing what was next. She disliked giving blowjobs.

He took a thick fistful of her hair. "That's right," he said, his voice slightly rougher now. "Be a good girl, and maybe I'll let you go." His fist tightened, giving her a tiny thrill of pain. "Maybe," he said.

Her lips parted involuntarily as she sucked in a quick breath. This was a little more like it. She gave him one last glare, just for effect, and then lowered her gaze and opened her lips and took his cock into her warm wet mouth. His cock was very stiff, more so than she could remember feeling it before, and she felt the first flutter of her tummy and vaginal muscles since he had arrived. She took him all the way in, coating him with drool, gagging slightly, making her eyes sting with tears.

"There we go," he said. Evidently he saw this as an excuse to impose his own wants, his own tastes on her a bit more. She felt a flicker of anger at that, but it excited her also; she sucked hungrily, taking him all the way in again, and moaned, deep in her throat.

"Oh, God," he groaned. His grip on her hair tightened more, unconsciously now. It hurt, but with her mouth full of his cock she had no way to object. Just to see if he would let her, she leaned back slightly, to try to free her mouth. But he didn't let her. His other hand slipped under her hair and closed firmly around the back of her neck. Plainly, he wasn't going to let her go, or even speak, until he came in her mouth. And then, she knew now, he would insist she swallow. He had always wanted her to do that, and she had always refused. Tonight, she knew, she would be given no choice.

And maybe - she feared? or hoped? - not from now on.

At that thought, her handcuffs bit sharply into her wrists and she realized it was because she was trying to reach around front to stroke her clit, to work her fingers in and out of her pussy, which was very damp. She whined in a mixture of frustration and mounting excitement, the two seeming to feed on each other.

She looked up at him. That was another thing she never did. To look up at this man, whom she considered her professional inferior - as much as she liked him personally - as she knelt and sucked his cock, had always seemed too degrading. But now that was what she needed. She needed him to know this was right; this was how it should be.

To her mingled relief and disappointment, his eyes were closed. She moaned, loudly, but he didn't open his eyes. She felt his cock swell slightly inside her mouth and knew it would be any moment now. Slowly, deliberately, she forced her mouth down onto his cock, trying to take it all the way in again -

He groaned, loudly, as he came nearly down her throat. She didn't have much practice at this, and didn't know to wait and let him finish before trying to swallow. She choked almost at once. Dozens of droplets of his cum sprayed out of her mouth around his cock, but more of it shot out of her nose. And more kept coming, jet after jet of warm semen striking the back of her throat. She shook her head wildly, almost panicking, but it was like she had a log jammed in her mouth. Finally, with a whole-bodied spasm, she managed to free herself. She doubled over, to what extent she could, coughing, almost retching. Her mouth and nose were joined by several thick strands to a small but quickly spreading pool of semen and drool on the wooden floor.

She was dimly aware of him moving away from her, and then he was back, kneeling beside her, dabbing at her gasping mouth with a white cloth. It was her panties, she realized, the ones she'd been gagged with earlier. She sucked in a deep lungful of air and then gave several hacking coughs that seemed to scrape her airway raw. Her deep shaking breaths alternated with more coughs, but at last both began to subside.

"I'm so sorry," he was saying. "I don't know what - "

She shook her head quickly. His concern was welcome but she didn't want him to apologize. She tried to speak, but coughed again. At last she managed to say, "It's all right." Her voice was thin and watery. She cleared her throat, but it didn't seem to help.

"I don't know what got into me," he said. He seemed to need to explain.

"Ian," she said, more firmly, "really, it's all right." Zatanna was not given to pretending things were all right when they weren't. It was one of many things he liked about her.

He frowned slightly, and she realized he would feel better if she were angry at him. For some reason that made her giggle. Then she coughed up some more fluid. She didn't feel like swallowing, so she spat it into the puddle on the floor, which by now touched her knees. It was getting cold.

"Here." He had found the jar with the keys in it - it had tipped over and rolled away, unnoticed - and in a moment he had both her sets of handcuffs off. He helped her get stiffly to her feet. A few minutes later she was upstairs, sitting on her bed, wearing a bathrobe he had taken from her closet and gently wrapped around her.

He was pacing her bedroom. "I wish I could stay," he said.

"It's okay," she said. He was married. For Zatanna, it wasn't the ideal situation, but it gave her most of what she wanted. She needed her alone time too.

"You're sure?"

She smiled and brushed a lock of her dark hair out of her face. "Actually, it was nice." And it had been. Not at first, but then he'd started to get it. And not at the end, but that was just an accident. Next time would be better.

His eyes stayed on her but his face turned slightly to the left, so he was no longer looking straight at her; it felt like a look of reappraisal. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," she said softly.

He kissed her.

As he was turning to leave he stopped and said, "Almost forgot. I brought you something."

She smiled. He didn't bring her presents often, but he had a knack for picking things she liked. "What is it?"

"I left it in your study. One sec," he said. She opened her mouth to tell him he didn't have to go down two flights of stairs and then back up, but he was already gone. Well, she was kind of curious.

A minute later he was back, with a package wrapped in white tissue paper. It was about the size of an apparel box, and she tried to keep the disappointment out of her face. But when she took it from him, it was clearly too heavy to be clothes. She shook it lightly, but didn't hear anything. He leaned against the wall, watching with amusement; she always went though this routine with her presents, as if she weren't allowed to open them until she guessed what was in them.

At last she set the box on her lap and said, "Emases Nepo!" The tissue paper neatly peeled itself away from the box. He was also one of the few people who knew her magical abilities were not merely illusory. He had never shown a hint of jealousy, which was another reason she liked him.

The lid popped off the box, and inside was - her eyes widened. It was a book, a fat oversized volume bound in plush black leather. She took it out, lifting it by the tips of her fingers, hating to get fingerprints on it. But the binding felt so soft and - surprisingly - warm that soon she was cradling the book in her hands, enjoying the luxurious feel of it. Zatanna would never have worn a leather jacket, but somehow she had never been quite able to extend this principle to books. And this one felt...almost alive, somehow.

Zatanna read compulsively, as her study attested. Her bookcases were crammed with books until the shelves sagged in the middle, and piles of books were stacked on every available surface. She loved digging through used bookstores looking for old books, forgotten books, books on obscure subjects, books that intimidated other people. And this - it was less a book than a tome. It was deliciously heavy; it must be over a thousand pages, and large pages at that. The glossy black binding gleamed, seeming almost to radiate light in the dim bedroom. It must be the gold leaf tooled into the leather. Why hadn't she noticed that before?

"Ian," she said, still weighing it in her hands, "this is fantastic. Thank you." She turned to the spine, looking for the title, but there was none, just more of the gold tooling, whose patterns seemed to grow more intricate each time she looked at them.

He chuckled. "You love it and you don't even know what it is yet." He pursed his lips. "Actually, I couldn't find the title either. But I think you'll like it."

She opened it as close to the middle as she could. You couldn't judge a book by its cover - though she supposed she'd just done so - but in her experience, a random glance into the heart of the thing was enough to tell her whether she would like it.

And she knew at once she would like this one. The pages were crammed with text, three columns each, small print. And yet the words were clearly legible, perfectly chosen, easily understood. It was a book about summoning. That was Zatanna's current interest, and she was quickly falling in love with it. In her view, summoning offered far more potential than the other branches of magic - illusion, conjuration, and so forth. To reach into other worlds, to seize control of hitherto unimagined beings, to bind them to your will - that was what magic had been made for. And this book was about summoning - all about summoning, she quickly saw, leafing through the pages. The information seemed almost to flow off the page and through her eyes and into her mind.

She realized he was saying something. "-anna? You still there?" He was amused.

With an effort, she lifted her gaze from the book. She felt a flicker of irritation at the interruption, and a brief but sharp desire to hide the book from him, as if he might take it back. But that made no sense; he had just given it to her. She shook her head minutely, as if to whisk the feeling away, and it was gone. She made herself smile. "Yeah. Sorry. I got sucked in."

"So I saw." He took it as a compliment on his present. He kissed her again. "Don't read it all night. Get some rest." Then he left.

Reluctantly, she set the book on her night table. She would have liked to sit up reading it, but she was exhausted; better to tackle it in the morning, with her mind fresh. She slipped between the sheets and closed her eyes. "Tuo Sthgil," she said, and the room went dark. She was out almost at once.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part two

Later, she realized the nightmares had started that night; and though she was usually very interested in her dreams, she never caught the seeming coincidence. Anyway, the first one was hardly a proper nightmare; just sleep paralysis. That happened to her once a year or so.

She was kneeling, nude, on the hard wooden floor of her basement study. Instead of candlelight, there were shafts of sunlight coming through the ceiling, as if the top two stories of her house had been ripped away, leaving holes in the ground floor. She felt exposed and afraid, as if there were people above who might at any moment look down and see her.

From behind her came a rhythmic dull thumping. She felt a sense of recognition, and of dread, as if she had seen this before and knew something terrible was about to happen. She tried to move before remembering she was handcuffed. But it was worse than that; it was as if her entire body were bound by ropes, layers of them. She could not even inch along the floor. She moaned quietly into her gag.

It was not Ian coming down the stairs. It was not even human. It was tall - the thumping she heard was not its footsteps, but its head striking the low ceiling of the stairwell. Beyond that, she could picture it only as a kind of blurry outline. She was not sure what it would do if it caught her. She only knew she did not want to find out.

She tried to twist around, to look behind her, but she could only turn her head enough to see the book lying atop her desk, in the center of a broad beam of sunlight. The black leather swallowed the light, but the gold leaf seemed almost to flame. She thought randomly that it seemed too vivid to be a dream, and that was when she realized she was dreaming, but it did not lessen her sense of danger. If she could wake up, she would escape, for she was sure the thing could not follow from her dream into the real world. If she could not, it would get her, and whatever happened would be no less real for being in a dream.

She struggled to open her eyes, but it was as if they were fighting her, trying to pull themselves closed again. She could actually see the fluttering concave shapes of her eyelids, and beneath them she could see her bedroom, the white walls lit by sunlight, and the book lying atop her night table.

With a wrenching effort, she tried to move every muscle at once. She expected her body to nearly lift off the bed, as if electrocuted. But nothing happened. It wasn't merely like being wrapped in a straitjacket; it was as if she were a puppet with the strings cut. She tried to say something, to cast a spell, to scream, but her mouth was frozen as the rest of her.

She focused on breathing as hard and fast and loud as she could. That seemed to be the only thing she could do, and sometimes it worked. She could hear the breath rasping in and out of her mouth and nose, could hear the blood rushing in her ears. Harder. Harder -

Then her eyes were open and she was out of it, propped up on one elbow, gasping. She rolled over to face the door, ready to cast a spell in an instant if she saw something there, but of course there was nothing.

It took a while for the sense of dread to recede, and she was reluctant to turn her back on the empty doorway. The room was awash in morning sunlight, but it felt stark and bleak rather than reassuring.

She glanced at her alarm clock: it was after ten. She'd forgotten to set it. She heard the thumping again, and she realized now it was the roofers working on the house next door. Maybe it was her state of heightened tension - she was still breathing hard and could feel her blood rushing - but the rhythm of the thumping abruptly made her think of...

She had fallen asleep wearing the robe Ian had put on her last night. She hadn't tied the belt, and the robe had fallen open. Almost of itself, her hand slipped between her thighs, where she found her clit was swollen and stiff and beginning to peek out from under her clitoral hood. As she took her hand away her forearm brushed her right nipple; it too was hard, the areola around it pebbly with goosebumps.

Maybe that was all the thing in her dream had wanted to do to her. She felt a flutter of muscles somewhere below her tummy. She might have to think about that more later. Right now...

She sat against the headboard, with a pillow for a cushion. She pulled the covers over her crossed legs and opened the book across her lap. She smiled at the thought of the day ahead. She had no rehearsals, no appointments. Nor was Ian coming over, and for once she was glad; she wanted to lose herself in the book without distractions. All she needed was -

"Aet toh," she said, and a steaming cup appeared on the night table. She leaned away from the book as she sipped to avoid spilling any on it.

It was as easy and enjoyable to read as it had been the night before, or more so. With most spellcasting manuals she skipped the introductory chapters, but this one started right at her skill level. She no longer cared about the title or author; she had begun to think of it simply as "the book", as if she had no others. That wasn't unusual, though, when she found one she really liked.

"Conjuration," it read, "means bringing forth something from another place or time or both. Invocation means calling forth the aid of sentient beings. Necromancy means calling forth the dead, often for the purpose of control. Summoning touches on each of these schools. Yet it is more challenging than any of them. Its rewards - and dangers - are likewise greater. Summoning means bringing forth a sentient being, which is itself more complex than conjuring inanimate matter. What is more, it means bending the will of said being to the caster's own.

To enslave a lesser being is not a worthy use of the summoning arts. Nor, even, is conquering a being equal to the caster. These augment the caster's retinue only by increments. The true art of summoning is to take control of beings greater than oneself - giants, dragons, demons, angels - for in so doing, the caster gains a hundredfold. Such control is not born of brute strength or even magical prowess. It can be taken - and held - only by greater strength of will..." 

She nodded to herself. Her respect for the unknown author rose even higher, because this was just what interested her about summoning. She read on, drinking cup after cup of tea, as the ray of sunlight moved slowly across her bedroom.

"We begin with a basic exercise," the book read. Good. She wanted practice. "This spell summons a harmless creature - a beetle, a swallow, perhaps a toad. It is verbal, and needs no reagents or gestures." There was a list of about a dozen syllables. She didn't recognize the language or alphabet, but below each syllable was its phonetic equivalent in English. "Once the summoning is done, focus your thoughts on the creature. Impose your will on it..."

"Kas ra dis," she read, "dis va lun..."

Nothing happened. She frowned. She was sure she'd pronounced it right. Then she saw the sheet move at the foot of the bed. She smiled and slowly peeled the sheet back, so as not to startle whatever it was.

And dropped the sheet with a small shriek. It was a snake. She jumped out of bed and shrank into the corner. Her heart was pounding harder than it had after the nightmare.

The sheet rustled softly and the snake slid out almost lazily from under its edge. God, she hated the way they just...oozed along like that, out from their loathsome hiding places, rocks or high grass...or bedsheets.

The snake's skin was glossy black, crisscrossed by gold stripes that seemed to flame in the sunlight. Its eyes were gold, with irises that were black slits. It looked almost like a jeweled sculpture, except it was very much alive. It was, in a way, beautiful. Not that Zatanna was in the mood to appreciate it. Its forked gold tongue flickered at her, and she shuddered.

"Enogeb!" she said, her voice shaky, flicking her hand at it.

Nothing happened. She tried the spell again. The snake's jaw opened in a huge yawn - the inside of its mouth was gold as well - as if it were bored. Then it began slithering again. Toward the book.

That enraged her. This...thing was not going to get its slime all over her book. "Stop!" she said, her palm flashing out.

The snake stopped.

"Good," she said. "Now hold it right there." Keeping her eyes on it, she edged toward the bed, one hand stretching out toward the book.

The snake hissed. She jerked her hand back as if burned. Her fists knotted. Her initial fright was fading, mingled now with anger at her own impotence. Even had she known the snake to be harmless, she could not have picked up and flung it away; her nerves shrank at the thought of it.

Then she thought back to what she had just read. "Stop," she said again, forcing herself to look at the horrid thing, trying to fight down her fear and disgust at the mere shape of it. Again, it stopped.

She pursed her lips. She felt a little silly; she realized it was because she was not reversing her words. "Coil up," she said. She visualized the snake doing so. And it did, until it looked like a black and gold Tower of Hanoi - one of her favorite toys from childhood. All at once, it seemed much less scary. As an experiment, she pictured the snake hissing, but did not order it aloud. It hissed. She felt a small burst of pride. Not bad, she thought.

She considered making the snake tie itself in a knot or eat its own tail, but she disliked cruelty. She made it retreat to the foot of the bed until she could snatch the book away from it. She divided her attention between keeping it still and reading the book.

"Before summoning any creature," the book read, "the caster must know how to dismiss it. The caster should practice dismissing the creature before summoning it, especially with dangerous creatures that might turn on the caster and disrupt her concentration. Typically, a creature is dismissed by reversing the spell that summoned it..."

"Now you tell me," she muttered. She read the summoning spell backward. "...dis ra kas." The snake vanished. She relaxed somewhat, though she was still tense, and she felt sweat cooling on her body. Gingerly, she sat down near the edge of the bed and resumed reading. She left the sheet crumpled at the foot of the bed, so that nothing might sneak out from under it without her seeing it. 

"To underline the importance of knowing how to dismiss a creature before summoning it," the book continued, "we used a spell that often summons creatures that are objects of disgust or even of phobias - spiders, snakes, rats, bats, wasps, and so on." It was if she could hear the author pause to chuckle before the next words: "We trust certain unfortunate readers have gained an added appreciation for the dangers of treading incautiously."

Zatanna's mouth thinned. She had an instructor like this once - heavy-handed and faintly sadistic, the more aggravating for always being right. She disliked being made the butt of a joke, even for a supposedly good reason, and she certainly didn't appreciate being frightened.

She shut the book with a flick of her hand. Her gesture was the more vehement because she already knew she would go back to it, like - like going back to a faithless lover because he was so skilled. She wondered where that thought had come from. Anyway, she would simply have to be more wary. From now on, before casting any spell in this book, she would read ahead.

Wait. Hadn't the book said the spell summoned a harmless creature? "Harmless, my foot," she said, opening the book and trying to find the words again. Maybe the snake had been harmless, but... "This spell summons a lowly creature," she read, "a beetle, a swallow, perhaps a toad." Lowly, not harmless. Well, a snake was certainly lowly. Evidently she had misremembered.

She stood and went into the bathroom; all those cups of tea had caught up to her. She came out and went to the window and looked outside. It was late February; the air was chilly but the sky was clear. Too fine a day to be spent inside reading, especially as snow was forecast for later in the week.

An idea occurred to her. She picked up the telephone next to the bed and dialed Ian's office. His secretary answered, and recognized Zatanna's voice. "Hi, Jolene," the secretary said. "Just a moment." Zatanna could hardly call Ian at home, so they'd invented this cover for her. "Jolene" was a sales rep for a theatrical supply company. No doubt the secretary suspected something; but then, Ian once mentioned that his wife spoke to the secretary as if to a slacking housemaid, and so...Zatanna grinned.

When Ian came on she said, "Is this Ilmar the Inimitable?" She enjoyed twitting him about that. His marketing manager had thought it up. He'd never liked it, but it drew bigger audiences, so...

"Nope," he said. "You must have the wrong number, lovey."

"Too bad," she said, "I'm his biggest fan." She sighed. "I'd let him do anything with me."

"With a name like that?" he said. "He's compensating for something."

"Uh huh," she said. "What's your name, then?"

"Ian."

"Ooh," she said. "Nice and short."

"That's right. The perfect disguise."

"Yeah?" she said. "When you can show me?"

"Sunday afternoon," he said.

"That long?" she said, unable to hide her disappointment.

"Yeah," he said; he sounded unhappy about it too, which made her feel a little better. "Friday and Saturday I have shows - you too, I imagine. Tomorrow I have family stuff. I'd come over tonight, but..."

"Yeah," she said; he'd just been there last night. If you could have him whenever you wanted, you'd get bored, she reminded herself firmly. Anyway, that wasn't what she'd called him about, or at least not the only thing. "Well. I wanted to say thank you for the present again. I'm enjoying it."

"Yeah? Learning lots?"

From someone else that might have been a perfunctory question, but another thing she liked about him was that he listened to her, even when she talked about real magic, which he had no way of understanding. She described to him what she'd read that morning.

As she did so, she began to have an odd feeling. Usually, he flattered her by asking attentive questions, but today he was quiet. Her rush of words slowed; she felt more and more awkward. She stopped abruptly. "Ian, have you ever had a dream where you heard a story, and in your dream the story made perfect sense, but when you woke up and tried to write it down, you realized it was just a senseless jumble of words?"

"Yes, but - "

"That's what this feels like," she said. She shook her head, puzzled and embarrassed and faintly irritated with him, though she knew that was hardly fair. "Hm. Anyway, I was wondering - where did you get it? The book, I mean."

*

The address he gave her was less than an hour's walk from her house, so she walked. She hadn't been to this neighborhood in years, and now she remembered why. The houses had sagging frames and peeling paint and overgrown lawns. Half the storefronts were empty; the rest had barred windows. The sidewalk was cracked and uneven and festooned with weeds. It had rained the night before, and the damp surfaces of the streets and buildings reflected the sunlight bleakly. There were a few idlers, who glanced at her sullenly but otherwise ignored her. She wondered what Ian had been doing here.

There was no sign. The address was crudely inked over a wooden door, warped and discolored with age, with a small round window set in the top half. Peering through it, she could see a cramped dark stairway leading down. She tried the door; it was locked. She must have the wrong address.

Frowning, she walked around the building. It had two stories above ground. The brickwork was crumbling and streaked black with grime. There was an oblong window set just above the sidewalk that looked down into the basement. It too was filthy, but she could just make out the irregular outline of a row of books on a shelf just below the window. She clasped her hands together; if only she could get in there.

Then she noticed, lying in a muddy puddle almost at her feet, a piece of rolled-up paper. It was bright yellow and fairly clean; it couldn't have been there long. She picked it up between thumb and forefinger and let it drip, then gingerly unrolled it. It was printed with red ink. At the top was an exclamation point inside a triangle. Below that - "Notice. This property is condemned," she read. "Future site of Pointe East Luxury Condominiums." She snorted and let the paper fall. It must have been pasted to the door, but fell off and curled up and rolled away.

She wondered why the bookstore hadn't moved elsewhere. Anyway, she wasn't about to let some condo developer tear down the building with all those books inside, at least not until she had a look at them. She went back to the door and put her hand on the doorknob. She was about to mutter "Emases nepo" when she heard something behind her.

She started and turned around. The woman was small and bent with age, so the top of her head barely reached Zatanna's breastbone. She wore a tattered blue raincoat with the hood up and drawn tight around her face, so that wisps of white hair peeked from under it. Her forehead was all wrinkles, but her skin stretched over jutting cheekbones and her mouth seemed pulled into a permanent grin. Her eyes were set deep in their sockets, under heavy eyelids, but they were wide and clear and blue. All this gave her a cunning, watchful appearance.

"Hello," Zatanna said, trying to steady her voice. "Is this your place?"

The woman just watched her, and Zatanna had the feeling the woman knew what she had been about to do. But that's impossible, she told herself. She was about to repeat the question when the woman said, "Yes, it is. Or it was." The voice was thin and scratchy, but there was none of an old person's mumble in it. 

"What happened?" Zatanna said. She expected to get a boring and depressing half-hour lecture about the woman's misfortunes, but she was curious.

The woman said, "It was time to quit." Her tone was flat and faintly unfriendly, as if Zatanna had asked her about a disowned child.

"But - " Zatanna gestured to the low window. "Shouldn't you have the books packed up and stored? I could help - "

"Doesn't matter," the woman said. "I sold the last one yesterday."

Zatanna frowned. Maybe the woman had fallen behind on her lease and the remaining books had been repossessed. The woman's manner hardly invited her to ask. Then a thought struck her; she said, "Oh. Yes, my - uh, friend bought it for me."

A parade of emotions flitted across the old woman's face - surprise? Fear? Resignation? Malice? Then it settled back into the old watchful look, but there was something else there now, something knowing. Zatanna abruptly had the sense of having committed a horrible blunder, as if she had blurted out the whole story of her affair with Ian.

"Have you read it?" the woman said.

"I - I've started it," Zatanna said. She felt as if she were confessing to some shared perversion. And she was jealous at the thought of the woman reading the book first. But why would she have read it? She was no witch, Zatanna was sure of that. There wasn't a trace of an aura about her.

And then, somehow, Zatanna knew. When the old woman had read the book, it hadn't been a book about summoning at all. It had said something different to the old woman than it did to Zatanna. What had it been about? Zatanna was afraid to ask, because she didn't want to be right. The way you wouldn't want to ask a faithless lover who else he was seeing...

" - your money," the woman was saying.

Zatanna shook her head briefly. "I'm sorry. What?"

"I said," the woman said, "if I were a few years younger, I'd give you a run for your money." She gave a grin that exposed crooked teeth with several gaps. "He's a handsome young fellow."

"Oh. Right." Zatanna suppressed a shudder. She knew one day she would be aged and shrunken and bent like this woman, but...

"Well, then," the woman said. "As I said. The last one. I supposed someday I'd sell it, but..." She seemed to shrink inside the frayed raincoat. All at once she looked - the first word that occurred to Zatanna was sad, but that wasn't quite it. Just exhausted, she decided. Or, maybe, beaten.

The woman took a deep breath. "So. Nothing here for you. Enjoy your book." She might have been telling Zatanna to go home because it was time for her nap. But - the thought flashed into Zatanna's mind and stuck there - the next time the woman lay down, Zatanna was sure, she would not get up. She gave Zatanna the strong impression of having simply run down, like a wind-up toy using up the last bit of tension in its spring.

Zatanna stood there and watched the woman shuffle away without looking back. She had an abrupt urge to call after her, to catch up to her - it would only take a few steps - and make her spill everything she knew about the book. But it was as if her tongue and her feet were frozen. At last she lifted one foot, then the other, as she turned around and started back.

*

That night the dream came again, but this time it was no brief sharp scare just before waking; it seemed to last half the night, until she awoke, shaking and sweaty, at about half past three.

She was kneeling, nude, on the hard wooden floor of her basement study. The room was so dark she could see her desk and bookshelves only as hulking shapes; there was only one candle and it had burned down to a stump and was flickering. That didn't make sense, she thought, because she had just snapped the handcuffs closed around her wrists -

From upstairs and behind her, she heard the front door open with its familiar sound of wood scraping wood. She waited to hear it close. It didn't. She had just decided Ian wasn't going to bother to close it when it slammed, making her jump. Then she heard the sharp click of the deadbolt being thrown. Ian never threw the deadbolt.

She felt sweat begin to prickle all over her naked body.

She reached down for the jar with the keys to the handcuffs in it, even though she knew they would still be frozen in ice. But the jar wasn't there. Her fingers felt all around the wooden floor, searching every inch of the V between her calves, and then she realized she had forgotten to set the jar in place before locking the handcuffs. 

She heard the creaking of footsteps on the floorboards above her head. Then she heard a series of thuds, each followed by a variety of smaller sounds. She realized she was hearing drawers yanked open and their contents emptied onto the floor. Her fists clenched with a mixture of outrage at the casualness of the violation, and fear at the roughness of it.

She heard the rhythmic thumping of footsteps on stairs and she tensed, but the door to the basement had not opened. The sounds receded. He was going upstairs to her bedroom. He knew she was here and was looking for her. She realized she was trembling; if not for the gag her teeth would have chattered.

She heard more thuds, farther away, and she pictured him emptying out her dresser. Then there was quiet, and she knew he was going through her closet. The sweat was beginning to trickle down her body now. She kept a couple of vibrators down here (in the lower left drawer of her desk) in case she needed a little release between reading, but most of her toys were upstairs, in a box in a far corner of her bedroom closet.

She heard the footsteps on the stairs again, descending now, and then the creaking of floorboards, and then the door to the basement opened with the tiny squeal of an unoiled hinge. She closed her eyes, knowing it was childish but unable to help herself. Before, she had been silently begging the candle to keep burning just a little longer, so she could see. Now she found herself wishing even more fervently for it to go out. If the intruder couldn't see, he might go away. He wouldn't find any flashlights upstairs; she had none. 

There was a footstep on the first stair, then the second. The footsteps were cautious at first, then faster, more confident. Then they stopped. He had seen her. Frantic, she pulled against the handcuffs, hoping that by some miracle they would open, but there was nothing but the pain of the thin steel biting into her wrists.

"Stop," he said. It wasn't Ian's voice. She obeyed without thought, as if her body had already accepted her defeat; her arms slackened and her shoulders slumped and her head fell forward, so that her face was partly hidden by a curtain of her lush dark hair. She moaned into her gag, a long, low sound, almost a wail. He chuckled, and she felt her vaginal muscles tighten, as if they knew what would surely be next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find more here http://thesabu.com/comic/misc-pic-12-magic-gone-wrong/

**Author's Note:**

> You can find the picture here http://thesabu.com/comic/misc-pic-12-magic-gone-wrong/


End file.
